14/04851/FU | Construction of two new retail units (class use A1) and asso amendments to car parking | Savins Mill Way Kirkstall Leeds LS5 3RP. It takes 6 minutes to read this presentation. In order to stay within the 3 minute time limit | must omit several important points. My fundamental argument is that this application is premature because the Kirkstall ayratory is on the point of failure, and who knows today what additional land may be required to make it work adequately when all potential traffic generators come on stream over the next few years. The gyratory connects to the only river crossing point for a mile or more in each direction. If the gyratory is unable to handle the likely demand this could cause serious congestion on major orbital and radial routes, on both sides of the river. It could also sterilise valuable town centre land on the former Tesco site, and make it permanently impossible to achieve affordable housing in this highly desirable location. This application should be deferred until a comprehensive traffic report has been published, that includes a forward plan to handle the reasonably anticipated development over the next five years, At present there are no scheduled bus services into the Morrisons site. The bus stops are on Savins Mill Way, outside the curtilage of the development, ensuring that bus passengersmust walk the maximum possible distance across the car park in order to use the store. This appears to represent Morrisons company policy at the time that the store was developed, because there seems to be no logical reason to exclude buses from this site. At peak times there is conflict between buses on Savins Mill Way and queues of cars waiting to access the Morrisons car park and store. Such conflicts could be greatly reduced by opening a second access via the existing service road as shown on the plan above. Such access would make it much easier to get buses into and out of the car park area, and could allow them to drive closer to the entrance of the store. This secondary route could also be used for cars, reducing the queues on Savins Mill Way and allowing the majority of customers to adopt a "left in - left out” manoeuvre when visiting the store. The gyratory system will be over-saturated when all the neighbouring sites are fully developed, and a secondary access to the Morrisons site could provide some valuable additional capacity at peak times. Unfortunately the proposed development would permanently obstruct the secondary access road, so this potential resource will be lost for ever. ¢ The map below shows the gyratory as it will be when the new Metric development opens on Bridge Road. The basic problem with the gyratory design is that many of the road links between the traffic signals are too short. This means that they cannot store sufficient vehicles when their exit signal is at red, and when this signal turns green these reservoirs are soon exhausted. Green signal time is "wasted" waiting for vehicles to arrive from more distant junctions, seriously reducing the maximum throughput, The problem can be minimised by synchronising adjacent signals, or by shorter signal times, but this increases the overhead for stopping and starting. Any pedestrian phase must be long enough for people to safely cross the road.Traffic signal timing is optimised by computer, often with a final human "tweak". For one- way systems it is easy to create synchronised "green waves" which shepherd platoons of vehicles through the network, every signal turning green just as the leading vehicles arrive. But for this network the scope for optimisation is severely limited, because all the roads are two-way and the gyratory has two counter-rotating flows moving in opposite directions. Every right turn conflicts with vehicles coming the other way. Several previous designs had Poor accident records as a result The shortest links are on the A6S between Kirkstall Lane and Savins Mill Way, the left flare from the A65 northbound into Savins Mill Way and Wyther Lane outside Hollybush Farm. These short links seriously degrade network performance. There are new short links on Bridge Road associated with the Metric development. We do not know how these wil perform in practice. There is serious conflict between buses and customers queuing for Morrisons on Savins Mill Way. It is difficult to get traffic into and out of the former Tesco site between Kirkstall Lane and Beecroft Street. This site slopes steeply uphill from west to east. The junction between Beecroft Street and Kirkstall Hill is 30m higher the junction between the A65 and the B6157, or a gradient of 1 in 10. The difference in height is equivalent to a ten storey residential building. Tesco claimed that Beecroft Street was too steep to accommodate modern delivery vehicles, but produced no evidence to support their assertion. Tesco's proposed "solution" in their now-abandoned planning application would have caused serious inconvenience to local residents, and impeded the free movement of emergency vehicles. The gyratory has been known to saturate occasionally at peak times, but it has never been Properly tested under full load. When Morrisons first opened they fairly quickly drove the old Kwik Save supermarket out of business, so two high-volume food stores have never traded in Kirkstall at the same time. Allders was always a low-volume outlet, and BHS did little better, but the new retailers in the Metric Development on Bridge Road are likely to trade intensively, with high rents and a huge capital investment to pay off. Meanwhile work has started at Kirkstall Forge, which has scarcely figured in previous road traffic calculations. The development plan for Kirkstall Forge has changed over the years, and over-optimistic assumptions are often made about the number of rail passengers. Highway officers have realistically modelled the traffic flows for the new junctions on New Road Side and Vesper Gate, but we have seen no evidence that these figures have been correctly propagated across the rest of the highway network. The Forge developer has made no contribution to gyratory improvements, and Metric only made a small payment. None of the local developers and retail operators is presently ‘meeting the full economic cost of their business activities. There is a danger that all the accumulating backlog of highway improvements from the last twenty years might be charged to the last developer to start work, which is likely to be the new owner of the former Tesco site. This could preclude any social housing on this site, and might render it permanently unusable. It could easily remain a derelict eyesore for the next twenty years.It is possible to prevent the gyratory seizing up by rationing the number of vehicles entering the system, but this creates long tailbacks on all the approach roads. These queues eventually extend back to the point where they block remote junctions. This already happens on major orbital and radial routes at peak times, and in future we can expect this. for longer and longer periods each day. Kirkstall Bridge is the only river crossing for 2 mile or more in each direction, so the inability of this system to cope with orbital demand has adverse implications on both sides of the valley. It doesn't take a genius to see trouble coming, and highway engineers now acknowledge that the gyratory will fail at some point during the current planning period. The only questions are when, and what shall we do when the inevitable happens?